Typing These Four Characters Could Crash Your iPhone

iPhones and iPads experience brief crashes due to a recently identified flaw, to activate the flaw, only four characters are required

A security researcher discovered on Wednesday that Springboard’s Apple mobile user interface can collapse when the character “:: is typed.

TechCrunch confirmed that the characters in question cause Springboard to collapse when entered into the Search bar in the Settings app or when the user swipes to the right on their home screen and types them into the App Library search bar.

In reality, “: and any other character are all required, as others have observed. The bug causes Springboard to crash momentarily before reloading to the lock screen. The bug briefly caused the screen to turn black in other experiments.

When contacted, Apple declined to respond.

According to researchers who spoke with TechCrunch, the flaw does not seem to be a security concern.

“It is not a security bug,” stated Ryan Stortz, an iOS security researcher who analyzed the bug. Patrick Wardle, who founded the security startup DoubleYou and researched iOS, concurred.

Unlike a bug in 2020 that caused the Twitter app to crash for any user viewing a tweet with a specific set of characters, there is currently no evidence to suggest that anyone other than the owner of an iOS device could manually type the characters and activate this bug.